I never felt bad for Lester, he always made me uncomfortable. I felt sorry for the daughter, the girl Lester preys on, and the moody next door neighbor with the asshole dad. I think I mostly ignored the mom because as a teen girl I couldn’t relate to her storyline as much, but I sure as fuck knew how it felt to be…

Scott treats Knives like a lame hanger-on, but all she does is support him and go to his rock shows, which, if you’ve dated a musician, you know is the most boring thing a girlfriend could possibly have to do.

 I am honestly a little bit tired of so-called progressive dudes crapping all over Democratic ladies while not looking to so-called progressive men doing squat for either women’s rights or minority rights.

God, it was so good, actors, story, production everything. I wish it got more attention. Even here it didn’t really.

Matt Weiner is a dick, but I’m hard pressed to come up with a better written show than Mad Men. Some of the lines really sing.

I’ll have to read the book. The only specific instance I recall of government assistance (other than the homestead) is Mary’s college being paid for by Dakota Territory because the Territory didn’t have a school for the blind. This was mentioned in the manuscript for “Little Town,” but the published version has the…

It’s a major premise of the book. The Ingalls were hugely reliant on charitable donations from a government relief bill, to church donations from ‘back East’ of coal, clothes to foods to cash transfers from relatives. They probably would have been far better off banding together as a collective (see the example of…

Oh good. I know it gets panned here, but I enjoyed it. I didn’t think it was gritty for the sake of being gritty, I thought it worked well thematically and the actors were great. I really liked marilla. And of course the scenery was beautiful.

I actually liked Anne with an E. Granted, my expectations were pretty low, and I had the benefit already of knowing what to expect as I watched it recently, but it left me wanting more. I sort of like that they showed how poverty was not pleasant and that her vivid imagination was clearly an escape mechanism of her…

Land grants, yeah, but proving up on a homestead was difficult. You got the land, then had to live on it at least 6 months out of every year fot five years (eliminating opportunities to work for cash in some cases). The land had to be improved with buildings and crops. What handouts? I don’t believe there were any…

One of my favorite books as a kid (which I read shortly after graduating from the Little House series) is Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix. It’s about a young girl who THINKS she’s living in 1840s Indiana, only to find out that her village is actually a tourist attraction and it’s really 1996. The novel…

Bert Cooper’s eulogy for Mrs. Blankenship made me think of Laura. How monumentally the world can change in one lifespan.

Wilder died in 1957, so she probably had a passing knowledge of cars.

Mainly because they were lied to and conned from the get-go in order to provide the bulk of the labor in a doomed enterprise that made a handful of robber barons obscenely wealthy.

I remember as a kid reading that bit about when they had the variety show and Pa and the others dressed up in blackface and Laura referred to them as “darkies.” At the time I read them as a kid I had never heard that term and had no idea about how appalling it was. And then when you read all the bits about Caroline’s…

Both of Laura’s parents where crazier than shithouse rats, a fact I didn’t appreciate until I tried to re-read them as an adult. I could see Pa uprooting his family once to try to give the pioneer life a go, but he does it over and over and over even though it is pretty obvious that he sucks at it. I think a lot of…

I find it amazing they are held up as a model of gumption and self sufficiency. Their lives were horrible (by 21 century standards) but there were the receipts of a massive welfare program - land, federal hand-outs, goods from the East. And even with all that support, they couldn’t make it.

I think the problem with Anne with an E was the tone. It loses the humor and whimsy and adds totally unnecessary trauma. I was fine with including flashbacks of the abuse because that is hinted at in the book, but adding the part where Anne runs away, is almost sex-trafficked, and joins up with a peddler when she is…

Her nickname for him, Manly, wasn’t just a diminutive of his name.

almanzo was hot.